


Defende Nos In Proelio

by prufrocking (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-10-18
Updated: 2010-10-18
Packaged: 2017-10-12 18:19:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/prufrocking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben's old enough to make his own decisions now. He decides that he wants to follow in Dean's footsteps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Defende Nos In Proelio

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from [LJ](http://community.livejournal.com/inkstrokes/1237.html), because holy crap, I have an AO3 now. Yay, I'm a real fandom author now!
> 
> Yes, it's been about a week since I posted this on LJ, and there's still no chapter 2 in sight, but rest assured, it's coming along. Badly because I feel like I'm forcing dialogue right now and real life has a pesky habit of threatening to eat me, but it's coming along.

Ben is four when he first asks his mother if he has a father. (In retrospect, he doesn’t really remember why he asked in the first place; he thinks it might have been because some girl—Tina? Jennifer? Kate? he doesn’t even remember her name anymore and he laughs a little at that thought because there are a lot of girls that he doesn’t remember the name of these days—asked him that day why no one ever saw his dad around and when he told her that he didn’t have one, she replied, “Of course you do! Mine isn’t around anymore, but even I have one.”)

Lisa looks halfway between torn and fond for a split second before telling him, “Your dad was a good man, but he was gone before he got the chance to meet you.”

“What did he look like?” he asks.

When she replies, “Like you,” Ben starts to ask about what happens to people when they die. She tells him that they go to Heaven to be happy. She doesn’t tell him that it’s because their world is so full of nasty and scary things that they have to leave to be happy; she won’t take away his childhood like that.

When Ben comes home with a crayon drawing of their family a week later, Lisa isn’t sure how to take the stick figure with a halo and wings labeled “Dad?” floating next to the people labeled “Mom” and “Me” in front of their house.

Ben explains that the only other people without dads in his class all have dead dads, so that means he must have a dead dad, too, but all of them knew their kids so they could be happy in Heaven knowing they were good kids, and because his dead dad never knew him, he probably wouldn’t be happy in Heaven without watching over him and his mom first.

Lisa hesitates before saying, “He’s not dead.”

“Then where is he?” Ben asks, but Lisa doesn’t answer and only pats him on the head before putting the picture on their refrigerator with a magnet. Ben doesn’t ask about him again, not yet.

 

The drawing comes down from the fridge as Ben grows up, replaced by report cards and tests. It’s been years since he’s last seen it, and he doesn’t even remember it anymore.

 

Ben is eight when he finds out that monsters are real.

He’s a little confused when Dean starts talking to him in their backyard. He’s never seen him before and Mom told him never to talk to strangers, but he saw him talking to Mom and figures it’s all right. When Dean runs away after Ben explains to him just how epic his birthday party is, he decides that Dean’s probably just another stuffy adult like all of Mom’s other friends.

When Dean teaches him how to deal with Ryan the jerk and his posse, Lisa is beyond angry at him but Ben starts to think that he just might be really cool.

Ben starts to think that Dean is _awesome_ when he helps him save everyone from the changelings.

He’s listening to AC/DC when Lisa tells Dean that he’s not Ben’s father, but he can hear them clearly. He thinks— _hopes_ —she’s lying.

 

Ben is ten the next time he sees Dean.

He barely gets a glimpse of him; it’s the middle of dinner when the doorbell rings and Mom goes to get it. Ben sees Dean in the doorway as she opens the door, but doesn’t run up to him even though he wants to. He just watches them talk because he can’t hear them from where he is. He starts to think that he probably doesn’t want to hear what they’re saying, either, because Dean looks like he’s about to cry and Mom is shaking and yelling at him. When Dean leaves and she closes the door, she starts sobbing and Ben doesn’t really know what else to do but go up to her and hug her. He knows better than to ask about what just happened.

Dean comes back a week later, crying. Lisa holds him as he sobs into her shoulder, rubbing small circles on his back. She yells at Ben to grab a beer from the fridge and he does. Dean hugs him when he comes over to give him the bottle and he hugs back, gripping tightly onto the bottle’s neck so he won’t drop it. When Dean lets go, Ben hands him the bottle but doesn’t ask why he’s crying. Can’t ask.

He stays this time, though, even if he brings with him post-traumatic stress about hellfire and nightmares where he screams “No, _Sammy,_ ” and sometimes, on particularly bad days where he decides to sleep on the couch instead of with Lisa, both. Ben feels a little selfish for thinking it, but he would rather have this Dean than no Dean at all.

Dean gets a little better after a few months. He puts the Impala under a brown tarp—which Ben will admit hurts to see a little every time he goes in the garage—and starts working construction. He makes friends and takes both Lisa and Ben out for dinner and amusement park trips and other fatherly things.

The subject doesn’t come up again, but by this point Ben is definitely sure Mom lied to Dean two years ago.

 

Ben is two weeks from twelve the first time he holds a gun. Dean told him, a year ago, a few weeks after he came back, never to touch the Impala, _especially_ the trunk, but Ben’s still curious. He knows Dean is hunting again, even if he doesn’t realize it yet, itching to get back in the game, even though he keeps saying he won’t and doesn’t want to. He feels a rush when he reaches in the trunk and picks the shotgun up, pretending to aim it. He’s sure that when Dean sees him with it in his hands, if he explains that he just wants to learn to defend himself, to do what Dean does, the man would understand and teach him to shoot like he taught Mom. Ben isn’t expecting it when Dean yells at him instead.

He locks himself in his room for three hours, curls up in his bed and just thinks about how much he wants to hate Dean but can’t. How he wants to be able to protect himself properly so Dean can’t get worried anymore.

Dean leaves later that week, telling Ben that he probably won’t come back.

He comes back a week later for Ben’s twelfth birthday and takes him out to a ballgame.

 

Dean would end up taking Ben to see baseball every year for Ben’s birthday. It quickly becomes the only day of the year that Ben regularly sees him.

 

It’s when Ben turns sixteen that Lisa finally tells Dean that he’s Ben’s father.

“I’m sorry I lied,” she manages to say.

Dean doesn’t know what to say, how to react. He sits on the couch and leans his head onto his hands, elbows digging into his thighs, trying to process it.

They think he’s asleep, but Ben is hiding behind a wall, watching from upstairs. The silence is suffocating.

He hears Dean ask, “How long have you known?”

Lisa fidgets. “I ran a proper DNA test after you left.”

“Which time?” Ben feels sick knowing that Dean’s left them enough times to need to ask.

“The first time.” Dean stays quiet and Lisa takes it as confusion. She clarifies, “After the changelings.”

“Eight years, Lis?” Dean’s standing now, too angry to sit. “Eight years and you couldn’t say _anything_?”

Ben can’t bear to hear any more of it and quietly returns to his room. He closes the door before grabbing his keys and wallet and climbing out the window. He climbs into Dean’s white truck—no, it’s _his_ truck now; Dean never owned it, not really, not like he owned the Impala—and starts it up. He sees Dean running out of the house and Mom coming out not long after in his side view mirror and slams his foot on the accelerate. He steps lightly on the brake to stabilize the car’s speed and continues driving, not stopping until he’s well out of Cicero.

He pulls into the parking lot of a shady-looking, cheap motel and walks over to the check-in office. He raps lightly on the closed window to catch the clerk’s attention. The old man in the room jumps up, startled, then turns around and opens the window.

“What’ll you have?”

“A single for one night, please.” Ben pulls out two fifties from his wallet while the other man is reaching in a drawer for a key; he doesn’t have eighty dollars in any smaller bills.

The clerk gives Ben a sad look and takes only one of them. “You’re too young to be splurging like this, kid. I’ll make it forty, just for you.” The cash register rings and he takes out a ten after placing the fifty in.

“Keep it,” Ben interrupts, taking the key on the counter.

The man shrugs and turns back to the small television set in the corner of his booth as Ben saunters off to room 27.

When he opens the room and steps inside, it smells of mildew and dust but Ben continues breathing the scent in because it exhilarates him and makes him feel like he has purpose. He closes the door and smiles as he lines all the openings in the room with salt. He turns the lights out after he’s done and sits on the bed, mattress groaning under his weight like it’s about to collapse after seeing one too many rough nights. He curls up in the sheets that are too scratchy to be like his own, drowning in the warmth of something that feels like home. It doesn’t take long for him to drift off.

He thinks it’s some of the most comfortable sleep he’s had in a long time.

 

When Ben returns home the next day, Dean isn’t there anymore, but he expected that. His mom’s staring at him and her eyes are red and puffy, shadows circling them. Ben feels a little guilty looking at her face.

She’s holding a shotgun—it’s the same one Ben held four years ago, he thinks—in her lap and says, “Dean wanted you to have this.” She holds it up.

Ben walks over to her and takes it. He gingerly examines the weapon with the same curiosity he had the first time he held it before he looks his mother in the eye and asks, “What do I do with it?” He doesn’t even know how to shoot the thing, much less load it.

“I don’t know.” Lisa looks away from Ben and stands up. She adds, “Don’t really care,” before she decides to walk back to her bedroom to finally get some sleep. They don’t say anything to each other for the rest of the day.

The following morning, Lisa grabs some empty soup cans, her son, and her son’s new shotgun and loads them all into the truck. She drives them out to an empty field and sets the cans up on fence stubs before proceeding to give Ben his first shooting lesson.

Ben’s a natural at it. It’s in his blood, Lisa thinks.

 

Dean doesn’t come when Ben turns seventeen.

This isn’t the first time Dean completely ignores their calls for an entire day—understandably, considering he’s usually on a particularly sticky hunt those times—but he usually calls back within the week. Even though Dean’s never missed any of Ben’s birthdays before, they figure that he just underestimated how long his current hunt was going to take him. Days pass, but Ben doesn’t stop calling. After two weeks, he gives up.

Ben’s not sure if it hurts him or Mom more, but he doesn’t want to know. He leaves the house and drives out to the field his mom taught him to shoot in again. He aims and pulls the trigger on anything he can, pinecones and squirrels alike, even though it’s not squirrel season. He doesn’t quite care if he’ll get arrested for it. Lisa doesn’t stop him.

He feels better after a couple of hours at the field and even better when he doesn’t get caught.

 

Ben graduates from high school later that year, surrounded by happy faces taking pictures with their proud mothers and fathers. He doesn’t have a picture from that day where he’s with either.

He doesn’t go to college.

 

When Ben turns eighteen, Dean is still missing.

Ben’s already packing, stuffing rock salt bullets and silver knives with his shotgun and the notebook of exorcism rituals in Latin and Devil’s Trap patterns and angel-banishing sigils custom-designed by Castiel that Dean left for them  into a duffel bag when Lisa tells Ben that she’s staying home.

“Why?” Ben is angry. Worried. “You’ll be safer at Bobby’s.” They both flinch as soon as the words leave Ben’s mouth; he’s becoming more and more like Dean with every passing year and it doesn’t hurt any less for either of them.

“It doesn’t feel right leaving our home,” she says. “And maybe Dean’s safe after all. He’d come here to check in on you before he’d even think about heading to Bobby’s.” Ben notices she doesn’t say _us_ but keeps his mouth shut about it. He sighs in frustration and goes back to packing; it’s no use arguing with his mother when she’s got her mind set on it.

When he’s fully prepared and finished loading his supplies into the truck, Lisa says to him, “Stay safe and come home soon.”

Ben gives her a tight hug and replies, “I will, Mom.” He lets go and bends down to let her give him a kiss on the forehead; he’s eighteen already, but he’s still his mother’s son.

He climbs in the driver’s side and hangs a rosary on the rear view window after he closes the door. He can see his mother in it and has to smile just a little bit at the tense way she holds herself. He starts the engine, rolls down a window, and waves at her before driving away.

He sticks some Nirvana in the CD player and leans back in his seat, relaxing as Kurt Cobain’s voice floats through the speakers of his car; he has thirteen hours left before he reaches Sioux Falls.


End file.
